Two Domains on 1 Dedicated IP?

[c3p0]

I have a dedicated IP for my website. However, I discovered that a completely different domain has the same IP, and the result is that it is mirroring my site. For example, if I go to my website (www.mydomain.com), I have my website. But if I go to the other website (www.otherdomain.com), it's exactly the same as my site.

How could this happen if I have a dedicated IP?

I actually do not think that the other site is purposely mirroring my site because that domain name is completely unrelated to mine, and I only put up my site a couple of days ago and nobody really knows about it. I tend to think it has something to do with the IP address and DNS. Any ideas? What are the possibilities? Thanks.

[jdMorgan]

c3p0,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Sounds like they may be the previous "owners" of your IP address, and that the DNS record for their domain name still points their domain to your IP address.

Use WHOIS to find the information for that domain, contact the owners and ask them to change the DNS. If that fails, find out who owns the nameservers and ask if there's anything they can do. If not, you might consider moving to a different IP address (discuss this with your host or whoever provided you with that IP address). This might be the simplest answer if they'll cooperate. If not, you can use server-side code to block requests for that domain from showing your content. There are many ways, but mod_rewrite on Apache, ISAPI rewrite on IIS, or even PHP or PERL can be used.

Jim

[c3p0]

Thanks for the reply. My host did give me a new IP, but how can I determine if this new IP has the same problem? I only found out by chance that my old IP had the problem.

Wouldn't lots of other domains out there also have this problem? Maybe it's just me, but I don't seem to hear this problem mentioned very often.

Also, I guess I am not fully understanding dedicated IPs. In what sense is a "dedicated IP "dedicated to a particular domain if another domain can also use it?

Thanks.

[jdMorgan]

It's dedicated in the sense that your host has assigned that IP address on their router to connect to the server filespace where your site is hosted. The problem comes in when a DNS error associates another domain with that IP address.

The IP is not "dedicated to your domain." Rather, it is uniquely associated with your server filespace. But that does not mean that someone else can't point their domain to it by accident or negligence. Remember that your host controls your server and your IP assignment. They do not control the DNS system that associates domains with IP addresses -- that is a completely-separate system of distributed DNS servers all over the world.

This type of DNS problem does happen occasionally, especially with abandoned domains. I'm not sure how you'd find it, except by doing a search for relatively-long (like ten words) uniques phrases on some of your most visible (high link-popularity, high Google Page Rank) pages, and checking to be sure that no other domains appear in the search results.

Jim

[c3p0]

Hmm...there isn't a way to quickly and definitely check if there are other domains attached to my IP. Is it possible then to use server side code to block requests from all domains except for my domain? My site just went up, and I want to start off right with the search engines.

I discovered the problem with my old IP when I saw in my logs that there was a failed referer request from the other domain. Strange thing is that it looks like the other domain is an abandoned domain with an unpopular name, so I don't think anyone clicked anything on that domain. Also, my site only went up for a couple of days, so I think the chances are low that someone just happened to go there while my site was up. I hope there's a clue in here somewhere. Any ideas on why there was a failed referer request from the other domain?